TapGuest Wins Our Build a Business on Twilio Developer Contest

You know the deal, you go to a restaurant, ask for a table, they tell you it’s a 30 minute wait and hand you one of those bulky taser-looking things that lights up when your table is ready. You can leave the restaurant and roam around, but you have to carry the mini obelisk with you, and you have to be careful to stay in range. The team at TapGuest used Twilio to build out a solution that uses SMS and Voice to let diners know when their table is ready. TapGuest focuses on the iPad, but works with any desktop computer.

“We built TapGuest.com to solve the waiting problem at restaurants, and to solve the quality problem from the current offerings claiming to be iPad ready, friendly, etc. Our service is 100% built for iPad with nothing to download, is easy to read, even in the dark, and most importantly, TapGuest provides 1 click functionality and workflow automation. We fully implement Twilio’s services with both SMS and Voice services, including Voice Response, and intend to expand our service features, over time, to utilize Twilio’s power including multiple languages, Short Codes as well as other features.

“We built the service over the past 6-7 months initially entering it into the 500Startups contest trying to win one of the 10 funding awards. Despite not winning (we fully expected a check, a jet and a limo, or at least a bamboo steamer or some rice-a-roni), we remain committed to achieving success the old-fashioned way – Bootstrapping and Persistence. We are a team of 3 driven guys (only 1 is a developer) working remotely. We have an overwhelming desire to solve the world’s restaurant waiting problem by replacing and banishing light-up, unsanitary restaurant pagers or antiquated clipboards with TapGuest. We conceived, created and iterated TapGuest several times over the past several months with the help of numerous restaurant professionals to insure the very best features and benefits.”

Get Building!

We’re running a special, longer contest this week with our friends at Pachube. Mash the Twilio API up with the physical world, and you could win yourself $100 in Twilio credit, Twilio swag, and a fully programmable Parrot Quadricopter AR Drone! Get all the details here.